served
to convey the points of his dialogue with more precision. It seemed
to head the shafts to carry them deeper. Not one of his sparkling
sentences was lost. I remember minutely how he delivered each in
succession, and cannot by any effort imagine how any of them could be
altered for the better. No man could deliver brilliant dialogue--the
dialogue of Congreve or of Wycherley--because none understood it--half
so well as John Kemble. His Valentine, in Love for Love, was, to my
recollection, faultless. He flagged sometimes in the intervals of
tragic passion. He would slumber over the level parts of an heroic
character. His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed
to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The
relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since
him--the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the
players in Hamlet--the sportive relief which he threw into the darker
shades of Richard--disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods,
his torpors--but they were the halting-stones and resting-places of
his tragedy-politic savings, and fetches of the breath--husbandry of
the lungs, where nature pointed him to be an economist--rather, I
think, than errors of the judgment. They were, at worst, less painful
than the eternal tormenting unappeasable vigilance, the "lidless
dragon eyes," of present fashionable tragedy.

ON THE ACTING OF MUNDEN

Not many nights ago I had come home from seeing this extraordinary
performer in Cockletop; and when I retired to my pillow, his whimsical
image still stuck by me, in a manner as to threaten sleep. In vain
I tried to divest myself of it, by conjuring up the most opposite
associations. I resolved to be serious. I raised up the gravest topics
of life; private misery, public calamity. All would not do.

--There the antic sate
Mocking our state--

his queer visnomy--his bewildering costume--all the strange things
which he had raked together--his serpentine rod, swagging about in his
pocket--Cleopatra's tear, and the rest of his relics--O'Keefe's wild
farce, and _his_ wilder commentary--till the passion of laughter, like
grief in excess, relieved itself by its own weight, inviting the sleep
which in the first instance it had driven away.

But I was not to escape so easily. No sooner did I fall into slumbers,
than the same image, only more perplexing, assailed me in the shape
of dreams. Not one Munden, but